Menu

HackFMI 3.0 post mortem

HackFMI 3.0 was amazing

As always this was the best hackathon ever.

The organization was good from the very beginning till the end.
The surprise came from the participants. There were more than 30 teams and this is a huge number! More info here - http://hackfmi.com/hackfmi3-winners/

Who was in the team and what we did

This time the team consisted of 2 Android and 2 Web developers. We also had a designer to make the project look nice.

For the first time we had an idea of what to do before the start of the hackathon and we also kept the tradition in team's name.

This year team's name was Eight (the previous times we were Six and Seven).

The topic of the hackathon was Hack for charity. We spent over a night to think on what we should do to encourage charity.
We wanted to make something that can be useful even after hackathon's end. Because often the projects that are done within these 2 days just do not get finished.
We also wanted to do something that really helps. We can make websites, collect clothes and so on but it is a lot of additional effort to manage these. The project had to just work.

Our project is called SMS Help. It is a mobile application (+ website) - SMS campaigns aggregator. Donating by sending a SMS is the fastest and easiest way possible.

What we did is a website with crawler which gets the info from Bulgarian's SMS campaigns website DMS (http://dmsbg.com/), the script automatically inserts, updates and deletes the records saving them into a database. We also added the other SMS campaigns - those from Unicef (http://unicef.bg/), Red Cross (http://www.redcross.bg/) and http://bgkoleda.bg/. The script runs once a day. The Android application connects with the API, gets all campaigns' changes and updates its own database.

Pretty simple but super easy to run and manage.

We won

A first place award. Trophy, diploma and money award, special award from Komfo.

Tomorrow we will release v2.0 of the Android application and within 2 weeks - maybe v1.0 of the iOS application.